ELDO? Do you mean EBRO?EHRE? That's the German word for "honor," don't know the riverAs for ARNO, I think the most important thing about it is not to confuse it with Thomas ARNE, composer of "Rule, Britannia!"

I did the Patrick B. puzzle package that come out end of last year but never got most of the metas. Have until Valentine's Day I guess. Have since taken a break from doing regular-style crosswords and have focused on cryptics instead but I probably need to switch back soon.

So I wrote a tiny search engine for The New York Times crossword - spanning 15 years worth of clues and answers as a little weekend project. There are 432,205 clues from Oct 23rd 1996 to the end of 2011.

To do a weekday puzzle, an early in the week puzzle? No special technique, just practice, and eventually you can do a Monday puzzle in five or maybe four minutes. To get to three, maybe two minutes now that's when people are using the hand-eye

Well, I guess this is not physical technique per se, but one thing that helps is to be aware of the kind of words that are always in puzzles, to try to be thinking of the answer from the letters in the grid before you even look at the clues

So I wrote a tiny search engine for The New York Times crossword - spanning 15 years worth of clues and answers as a little weekend project. There are 432,205 clues from Oct 23rd 1996 to the end of 2011.

Looks like they found Anne had a mistake in puzzle one so she's dropped to fourth and now Dan F is in the top three. The guy in second I've never heard of but he's A division so he must have been in a final